The Little Red Chairs by Edna O'Brien

I'm grateful to the student in my recent SFU Mystery course who told me about this novel. An Irish writer living in England, Edna O'Brien was 84 when this "chilling masterpiece" came out in 2015. In a long writing life, O'Brien has won significant international prizes. She has also been vilified and seen her work banned and burned.

In an Irish village, we meet middle-aged Fildelma, who longs for a child, but with her much older husband, this dream seems dead. We also glimpse European migrants who have come to Ireland to work, earn and survive. One young man has been displaced and traumatized by the Balkan wars.

He is the only villager who is not impressed by the newly arrived healer. But Dr. Vlad soon charms the ladies, and many of the men as well. Fidelma gets disastrously embroiled in the doctor's life, and ends up fleeing to London. There she is befriended by displaced people who have left their own countries following traumas far worse than her own.

This is a book about sexual politics, about ethnic identity, about shaming and blaming, about the the human tendency to look away from what we do not wish to see, and about the meaning of home. With Fidelma, we seek to understand the nature of evil, and share her relief when in the end, she escapes its toils and finds the courage to "come home to herself."

This book is an absolutely brilliant portrayal of contemporary history, and an amazing read.